But really what he did and what his intentions seem to be fits almost perfectly as digital vandalism against Ripple.
Except that the actual vandalism/damage
to the Ripple system was
non-existant.
What about people losing their bitstamp BTC? That's the damage I was thinking of when I wrote that.
The only person that lost bitstamp BTC was someone that trusted TradeFortress to hold their BTC for them.
He claims he was not the one who ended up redeeming peoples bitstamp BTC, but that he just set in motion events that enabled people to effectively lose their bitstamp BTC. By lose, I mean have them replaced by TradeFortress BTC.
What would you think of someone if back when bitcoin was starting out, they had asked new bitcoiners to post their bitcoin private keys in exchange for a small payment or trade and if that same someone knew full well what the consequences of posting private keys would be? Would you excuse it as long as the person claimed to not use the secret keys themselves? Would you think it somehow showed a fundamental problem with bitcoin or with cryptography in general? Would you think it shows that some people are nieve and trust people with things that they don't understand?